Monday, November 26, 2007

Well, my fast computer is now unhappily very single and isolated and hasn't had the joy to talk to other computers around the world to exchange information. One can only imagine how it must be feeling at the moment.

Anyway, I haven't sulked like my computer in this new and warm house. The move went otherwise very well and the living quarters I am in are very spacious and especially friendly. The house is down-floors only and has 3 bedrooms, one kitchen and a large living room. Shower and toilet too of course, or it would become quite messy pretty soon.

This month I began a PHP job for a larger organization in Holland. Finished within a week and moved on to *another* PHP job, but dealing with secure payments and a security audit, the details of which I am not allowed to disclose under NDA :). I'm now working for an organization that grew very quickly and is very popular for GPS device lovers. Yep. That one. And it's got a bit of PHP there too, although I am not technically involved this time. I'm dealing with the joy to bring clarity into the functional description of the system. Challenging, fast and things change under your fingertips when you're writing things up. Feels very healthy when things change that fast, although it's difficult to keep a full view of what's going on.

I'm still reading cognitive science when I can. I read Steve Pinker's book a bit more and it's getting really interesting. When you really understand more about perception, how you work and think, it may sound like it takes away some magic, but it's also creating more mystery since no one has fully explained how things work (it's writing down their perceptions really... "hey, this is what the brain does too" ). Many of the things in our general day-to-day activities are so much taken for granted, that when you point things out to people they start noticing how amazing it is. Like how people are now used to getting water from the tap, electricity from their sockets and when the new generation now grows up with Google to find information. (Hardly able to imagine that "historically", books were used to look up information. For them, books have become "introductory" repositories of information from where you start to know more about the topic and "involved").

Good. I worked more on Dune as well and now I can generate PDF from HTML. Well, if you know blogspot and XPress and GMail... They use an "IFRAME" component basically that is set to "designMode" using JavaScript. From there onwards, you can manipulate elements within that text control in order to format it and do other funky stuff. I'm using an existing control called TinyMCE that is used to create the content. Then I process it in six stages towards a valid PDF document that looks very slick and nice.

The idea is to build fragments of text and cross-refer them to other things. Then you can start processing things differently and refer from within documents to other parts of er.... whatever it is you're building.

Sorry for the delay in getting new posts up. I really did not have the time or the availability of the Internet, nor inspiration or events to write new things down.